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Loading... Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer (edition 2021)by Rax King (Author)
Work InformationTacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer by Rax King
   None No current Talk conversations about this book.   )1   KallieGrace | Sep 6, 2023 |  This collection isn't all fun and games though, and some really tough things are brought to light in an honest heartfelt way. This is about more than Jersey Shore and frosted lip gloss; Friendship, growing up, hard lessons are also some themes that come along with the humor. There is nothing like intelligent, flowing prose from a very high level writing about something that's far beneath most peoples desires for themselves. Tacky is anything but. 4 out of 5 stars. Highly recommended if you grew up in the 90's or the early 00's. Thank you to netgalley for providing me an advance copy of Tacky by Rax King for me to read and share my honest thoughts. I am so grateful for the opportunity to preview the brilliance that is Tacky. (  ) chasingholden | Apr 26, 2022 |
King’s book is a well-calibrated celebration of “bad” taste: Creed, frosted lip gloss, “The Jersey Shore,” the Cheesecake Factory, the “Josie and the Pussycats” movie and (in this book’s silkiest essay) Warm Vanilla Sugar fragrance mist. That King writes about these things while alluding to Sontag and Updike and Penelope and Odysseus without once seeming like she is otherwise slumming is part of her achievement...King draws a line between tacky and trashy. The latter is “closed off and uninviting. It’s unpleasant. If tackiness is about joyfully becoming, trashiness has already become, and there’s not one joyful thing about the thing it has become.”...So winsome is the writing in “Tacky” that, most of the time, there’s no other word for it but classy. The personal and critical elements of the book don’t always line up. And despite its title, “Tacky,” does not seem all that interested in exploring the implications of tackiness, except to claim that it’s about “joyfully becoming,” a contention that sometimes seems questionable as she juxtaposes her tackiest cultural interests to stories of sexual disappointment and romantic pain. But tackiness is also a matter of class, with which she rarely concerns herself explicitly....“Tacky” ultimately has less to say about the “worst culture we have to offer” than it does about the way we make it through the worst of our own lives. There’s much to admire about that — and, for a kind of pop-culture-loving millennial, it will hit all the right notes. In her keen debut, King taps into her lifelong love affair with low culture in this joyful tribute to the tacky and argument that the “rightness so many intelligent, capable people pursue does not actually matter one bit.” In the introduction, the author lays out her take on the topic: “As far as I’m concerned, tackiness is joyfulness. To be proudly tacky, your aperture for all the too-much feelings—angst, desire, joy—must be all the way open. You’ve got to be so much more ready to feel everything than anyone probably wants to be. It’s a brutal way to live.” ... An engaging, hilarious, unabashed look at what we love in culture and why we should value it for what it is. “As far as I’m concerned, tackiness is joyfulness,” writes Catapult columnist King in her charming debut essay collection. Across 14 pieces that examine media artifacts tacky and tackier, King plumbs her own history to explore her—and society’s—relationship to pop culture....King balances her desire to understand her own past with an examination of America’s cultural propensity for the tawdry...“I hope that people learn how to have a fun time with the things they love, even the silly-seeming ones, before it’s too late.” King’s witty, conversational dip into nostalgia is a delight. DistinctionsNotable Lists
"TACKY is about the power of pop culture -- like any art, low or high -- to imprint itself on our lives and shape our experiences, no matter one's commitment to "good" taste. These fifteen essays are a nostalgia-soaked antidote to the millennial generation's obsession with irony, putting the aesthetics we've learned to hate to love -- frosted tips and glosses, Sex and the City, The Cheesecake Factory -- into kinder and sharper perspective. Each essay revolves around a different maligned (and yet, Rax would argue, vital) cultural artifact and its entwinement with Rax's millennial coming-of-age: an essay about the gym-tan-laundry exuberance of Jersey Shore morphs into an excavation of grief over the death of her father, who loved the show; in another, Guy Fieri helps her heal from an abusive relationship. The result is a collection that captures a personal and generational experience with clarity, humor, and heartfelt honesty"-- No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)814.6Literature English (North America) American essays 21st CenturyLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.77)
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